Naked is a 1993 British black comedy drama film written and directed by Mike Leigh and starring David Thewlis as Johnny, a loquacious intellectual, philosopher and conspiracy theorist.

Louise works as a file clerk and lives with two flatmates, the unemployed Sophie, whom she calls her "hippy-dippy friend", and the primary tenant Sandra, a nurse who is away in Zimbabwe.

Among the people he meets are Archie, a young Scottish man looking for his girlfriend Maggie on Brewer Street, and Brian, a security guard who looks after an empty office building at night, which Johnny calls "the most tedious job in England", while planning to move to a seaside cottage in the future.

[3] After pursuing a drunk woman and rejecting her when he notices a skull and crossbones tattoo on her shoulder, Johnny follows a young cafe worker home but is thrown out when she starts crying.

Scrawdyke was a loutish art student and absurd ideologue from Huddersfield who had trouble with girls and a hatred for his teachers...the play shared a deeply felt schoolboy coarseness with Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi, a piece originally written as a vicious attack on a loathed mathematics master.

[5] Thewlis's background reading for the part of Johnny included Voltaire's Candide, the teachings of the Buddha and James Gleick's Chaos,[3] as well as the Bible and the Qur'an.

[5] The song sung by Johnny and Louise near the film's end, "Take me back to Manchester when it's raining", was one Leigh used to sing with his friends in Habonim ("the Builders"), the international socialist Jewish youth movement he joined as a schoolboy.

After the film was released, Leigh heard from a retired schoolmaster at Stand Grammar in Whitefield, Greater Manchester, who had written the song for a school revue in 1950.

Many shots are in stairwells and in borrowed flats whose tenants are hostile toward or unaware of the decor, making them seem disconnected from cultural touchstones and their place in their homes.

Alienation, sexual violence and misogyny, addiction and depression are touched upon as Johnny meets various rootless individuals who work in dead-end jobs or are unemployed.

His tactics are based on a particular form of intellectual bullying, directed at strangers and intimate partners alike, and summed up in domineering, scholastic barrages drawn from eclectic sources.

[3] Ben Myers, in a Guardian article calling Naked Mike Leigh's "finest work" and "the best British film in recent history", elaborated on the many theories filmgoers have had on whom Johnny might represent: "a modern, albeit highly flawed, Jesus attempting to change people's lives.

Thewlis, [...] wrapped like Hamlet in a black and inky coat, [is similarly] socially untethered but burdened with useless knowledge and a vicious, bullying line in repartee."

[8] Derek Malcolm of The Guardian noted that the film "is certainly Leigh's most striking piece of cinema to date" and that "it tries to articulate what is wrong with the society that Mrs Thatcher claims does not exist."

"[9] Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film four out of four stars and analysed the message behind the title, saying it "describes characters who exist in the world without the usual layers of protection.

"[10] Julie Burchill attacked the film in The Sunday Times, saying that Leigh's characters talked like lobotomised Muppets: "sub-wittily, the way Diane Arbus's subjects look."

Coveney wrote in the film's defence: "Is there no room for irony, for the idea that in depicting horror in the sex war an artist is exposing them, not endorsing them?